The Foreign Service Journal, January 2009

T his month, we will all be part of the historic inauguration of the first African-American U.S. president, whose mantra is change. We expect that the new USAID Ad- ministrator will not only have change in mind but improve- ment. As a USAID employee for almost 30 years, I have seenmany administrators come and go. All faced unique challenges and problems, but at no time do I recall the tsunami of issues we are currently experiencing: poor staff morale, confusing for- eign assistance roles, insufficiency of resources, deficient organ- izational structures and an unclear overall mission. Many of us have addressed this in previous FSJ articles, publications and studies. It is critical that USAID now take this opportunity to pursue a new path. The recommendations and observations below are based on my experience, my personal interactions with employees and the results of employee surveys. I hope they will be accepted as an honest, caring attempt to improve our agency. Organizational Structure With three different administrators in the last eight years, it was inevitable that the USAID organizational structure would be modified. The latest change, though, was disturbing. Along with naming the first director of foreign assistance to also serve as the USAIDAdministrator, a new entity called the“F”Bureau was created at the State Department. Concurrently, at USAID the Policy and ProgramCoordination Bureau—the traditional heart and lungs of our operation — was disbanded, with the idea that the F Bureau would take over some of its functions. The F Bureau was a well-intentioned but misguided effort to align our foreign aid with foreign policy along the lines of a new“transformational development” initiative. Unfortunately, the F Bureau did not work out as planned. Administrative paperwork increased for USAID missions worldwide, and the agency became hypercentralized. Strategic planning disappeared, and creativity and flexibility were crip- pled overseas as missions spent valuable time drafting country operational plans. USAID FSOs, sensing that F Bureau jobs were not career-enhancing, refused to bid on them, resulting in weak field-based experience in that unit. Many USAIDCivil Service staff were unhappy being forced to work at State, so turnover was understandably high. Today most of the F Bu- reau staff is comprised of State Department and USAID Civil Service employees who review country operational plans — work for which they have little practical background. The main premise of bringing USAID into the State De- partment was to ensure that foreign development projects would not involve activities contrary toU.S. foreign policy. This fear is illogical, because neither State nor USAID is a policymaker; both are implementers of policy. Recommendation: Disband the F Bureau and re-establish the PPC Bu- reau. If coordination is still a goal, a small number of State De- partment personnel should be assigned to work at USAID headquarters. The new requirement that the Office of Human Resources report directly to the Administrator’s office represents another major change. This seemed like a wise move at the time be- cause personnel issues were mismanaged for many years. How- ever, the real reason for continuing problems at the Office of Human Resources is the dearth of staff available to handle the increased demands of the agency. There is also a need to rethink the practice of always ap- pointing a Foreign Service officer as the director of HR instead of a professionally trained and experienced Civil Service per- sonnel expert. Very few HR directors have been personnel ex- perts. In the last 10 years, there have been five Foreign Service officers in that job, with backgrounds ranging from engineer- ing to health. Typically, they do not have the skills, knowledge or training to run the office at the level needed for such a com- plicated operation. In addition, the HR office should be under the assistant administrator for management, as before. Issues such as annual budgets and overseas staffing are too intricately related to manage in separate organizational units. Recommendation: Increase funding to fully staff the HR office and recruit a proven Civil Service human resources expert to be the director, who will then report directly to the assistant administrator for management. A Foreign Service officer can serve as the deputy in order to ensure that the overseas per- spective is taken into account. Personnel This is the area where the agency has made the most mis- takes. The mid-1990s reduction in force and the subsequent hiring freeze reduced the overall U.S. direct-hire FS and CS staff by a third, from about 3,000 employees to 2,000, in just a few years. However, the overall program funding for foreign assis- tance has almost tripled since then. To cope, the agency began creatively using program funds to supplement the meager op- erational expense funds being doled out by Congress. The re- sult was a huge increase in employees contracted to perform administrative work at headquarters and overseas. Next, all of these extra employees were made“legitimate”by converting them to Foreign Service Limited status. This cre- ated a parallel universe of personnel and lowered the morale of 58 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 9 A F S A N E W S V.P. VOICE: USAID BY FRANCISCO ZAMORA Advice for the New USAID Administrator